The Vigil

There are lots of different ways to enjoy birding; chances are you’ve seen folks with elaborate setups of feeders and cameras, or people driving across the country for a sight of a rare owl or fleeting warbler. I am firmly in the camp that if you enjoy looking for and learning about birds, you can count yourself as a birder — but every time I’m asked about my eBird lists, or if I’m doing a big year, it reminds me that my way of enjoying the hobby isn’t the dominant form in peoples’ imaginations.

There was a time where I would follow and track down rare bird alerts sent to email at 5 am, hoping for a chance encounter with something and running into the throng of other feather fans looking for the same thing… I quickly figured out that’s not my style. There’s too much disappointment to be found in this Pokemon-esque hunt to fill your list, and I would catch myself ignoring or overlooking everyday birds that were doing cool things because it simply wasn’t new.

What changed my relationship to birding was shifting my focus away from the hunt for a particular shot or a rare bird for the list; part of what was tripping me up was the order of operations. Instead of a search mission, it became an effort to truly get to know a location — instead of counting how many herons were around, I was noting where the good perches were. Learning where the most bugs were after walking a park for a week gave me insight on where to find flycatchers later in the summer; I could guess what might be in the reeds after learning how the light hits the marsh just so. It was the beginning of a relationship with the lands and waters I spent time in, and helped shift the definition of a successful outing from ‘seeing something new on my life list’ to ‘did I learn something new about this place and what inhabits it’ — a shift that made birding a more sustainable source of joy and knowledge, and led to more meaningful encounters along the way.

On the way out to some of my favorite haunts, I pass a four-way stop west of Ann Arbor that sits between a number of small ponds with drainage from the nearby farms. It is an unlikely nexus of different bird species, and you’ll find more herons, kingfishers, ducks and occasional eagles than in the actual nearby nature preserve. My favorite denizens are the Trumpeter Swans, with their giant white wings and telltale honks that never fail to entertain. A particular pair has been nesting at this street corner for years, and at some point I found myself visiting the nest daily.

It takes around a month for their eggs to hatch, and their watch over their future brood continues on this floating nest, five feet from the road. It's a dangerous place in some respects - cars fly past uncaring, there is exposure to some of their only large predators, and nest competition from other waterfowl abound. There are years where they've lost cygnets, and I’ve come to find the nest heartrendingly empty. But the longer I spent on our shared vigil, waiting with baited breath to see if this year’s brood would make it, the more I understood why this place was home for them. Maybe it’s not convenient for the humans nearby, but it clearly holds the nutrients, materials, and ancestral memory to bring them back again and again, year after year.

At first, I worried someone would just blow the stop sign and hit my car along with the tween trumpeter swans on the road out of frustration, but things started shifting over time. After a few days, I would see other folks slow down to see what I was staring at — the perks of having the stereotypical bigass camera lens — and marvel at the plucky birds making it work where they could. A few times, I’ve been able to share a postcard of the swan family with drivers who stopped, hoping they’d give it to the kid in the backseat and spark a protective memory like the one I’ve developed for this odd place.

I still get a lot from first-time encounters — the rush to confirm what I saw and why it’s there, the learning that comes from looking up facts while editing the photos, expanding my knowledge about things more broadly. That being said, it’s hard not to hold the depth of these kind of repeated encounters with our honored friends in my heart differently. It’s not fair that I am holding up some of my own emotional strength with their unspoken resilience and hard-beaked survival. But we’re both building our homes in spaces that are often hostile to us, and yet still hold enough of what we need to make it — and for now, that’s going to have to be enough.

Thanks for reading! I am still working to grow this newsletter, and would greatly appreciate sharing it with anyone who you think would appreciate it. If you are interested in purchasing prints of my wildlife artwork, you can do so at my online shop - proceeds support mutual aid efforts here in Southeast Michigan.